The Encryption Ritual

Two performers read a prepared script to each other — text built from a private conversation between a parent and a child making plans to end a pregnancy. Conversations like this one have been extracted from messaging platforms and handed to law enforcement, becoming evidence in criminal prosecutions. This piece doesn't reproduce any real conversation. It responds to the pattern: a private exchange, never meant to be read by anyone else, made legible to the state because the channel it traveled through wasn't built to keep it private.

Each performer's voice ran live through an encryption program built with my collaborator Gage Jones, scrambling what the audience heard. The performers themselves heard each other clearly, through headphones, on a channel that stayed open between them — so the reading could shift, depart from the page, adapt in the moment, in ways only the two of them would ever know. Afterward, each performer destroyed their physical script as thoroughly as they could.

Underneath the whole performance ran a musical cipher — a short sequence of notes spelling out a word tied to the ritual. It was never published as a key, though a musically literate ear might still recognize it. Even if the script had somehow survived, or the encryption had somehow been broken, the cipher was one more layer of a message built to resist being fully recovered by anyone but its intended listener.

The point isn't to guess at the words. The words were never the point — they never should have existed in public record to begin with. The point is the principle: that a private conversation is allowed to stay private, and that privacy, especially around the most consequential decisions a person makes about their own body, is a fundamental right, not a byproduct of which app you happened to use.